ABSTRACT
The problems of the transitional societies are of a different order than those found in the industrial West. The leading nations of the West are beset by the social disabilities growing out of technological affluence. Their productive powers have created within them a range of unprecedented socio-technical problems, problems of a type which have not yet cropped up in the under-industrialized emerging nations. Indeed, the primary question within many of the emerging areas is that of how to go about gaining admittance to the select company of the wealthy and affluent societies who need only concern themselves with the more abstruse social issues. Issues, not of disease and hunger, but having to do with such matters as how to distribute more equitably the ‘necessities’ of life, most of which ‘necessities’ the backward societies would consider as luxuries. For most of these societies even the Western standard of food consumption would be classified as luxury. Theirs is the problem of blunting the barb of direct physical need.
